Pitching high: cricket
The deeper the note, the further it penetrates through the vegetation, just as the roar of traffic cuts through the concrete jungle of a city. For larger animals, more dispersed through the forest, a loud, deep voice is essential. But small insects such as male crickets chirp at a high pitch as the females they're trying to attract are likely to be on the neighbouring tree.

Champion tenor: hammer-headed bat
Throughout the mating season the male hammer-headed bat repeats an amazing honk to attract females. The males compete, finding their own arena in a roosting tree and singing for all their might. These calls are so crucial to their chances of finding a mate, that their entire anatomy has adapted to making it – their voice box takes up half of their chest and their head is elongated so that it works like a trumpet.

Long-distance howler
In nearly all jungles, primates get up early to holler across the canopy. Most impressive are South America’s howler monkeys whose bony throat plate amplifies their calls so they can be heard 5km away. Howlers call to inform other troops of their whereabouts. They don’t keep strict territories, but they do defend their current feeding sites.

Jungle drummers: chimpanzee
Chimpanzees have worked out a less strenuous method. As they walk through the forest in search of food, they keep in touch with the troop by banging their feet and hands on buttress roots, producing a bass drum sound. They have favourite trees that they always drum as they pass. Many of these make distinctive sounds so the troop has a good idea of where everyone else is.

Trunk calls: forest elephants
The champion long-distance caller is the largest animal in the jungle – the forest elephant. Along with the usual huffs and the trumpets, elephants use sounds so low that they are beyond the range of human hearing. These infrasounds can travel for tens of kilometres through the habitat.

Strategy - Smell
Many jungle creatures manage to communicate complex information to each other without making a sound. In a place as loud and cluttered as a jungle, communicating by scent is a good option.

Homing in: moths and butterflies
Male moths and butterflies home in on their mates by following the special perfume trails that rise up into the jungle air at certain times of the year. Males track these from hundred of metres away. During the mating season, the pyralid moth (Diaphania spp.) extends pencil hairs from its abdomen to waft pheromones in the breeze. When not in use, these hairs retract into the body.

Trail-blazers: driver ants
Driver ants mobilise in organised swarms of millions of individuals. They march through a jungle inspecting every surface for prey in a highly co-ordinated way – yet are completely blind, relying entirely on scent to guide them. The advanced trail-blazers lay down a path of pheromones and when prey is found they retrace their steps, doubling the pheromone layer. When the full infantry arrives, they follow the smelliest trails, knowing that these will lead to the greatest abundance of prey.

Smelly feet: bushbaby
Many small insectivorous primates such as bushbabies, tarsiers and mouse lemurs hunt at night and use scent to mark their territory. The male Demidoff’s bushbaby urinates on his hands and feet and marks out his territory borders in smelly footprints. The urine also gives them extra grip as they walk along the branches.

Strategy - Touch
Not all creatures rely on remote sensory stimuli to give and receive information. Some jungle inhabitants take a more literal approach to staying in touch.

Common touch: communal spiders
While other spiders prefer to be left alone, communal spiders congregate in huge gangs, sometimes 1,500 strong. They spin an enormous web with horizontal web traps straddled between the understorey plants and vertical scaffolds to get from one trap to another. When hunting insect prey trapped on the web, they keep in contact by patting the web with their abdomens to call in for reinforcements.

Ready to rumble: forest elephants
To something as large as a forest elephant, the whole jungle floor can act like a spider’s web to transmit vibration. Elephants use ‘seismic communication’ – transmitting vibrating rumbles through the ground. They have special sensory cells in their feet that pick these up, and they use the time difference between feeling a call and hearing it to calculate how far away the other elephant is.

Mud croakers: white-lipped frogs
White-lipped frogs in Puerto Rica also detect ground vibrations. The males sit deep in the mud and croak repeatedly, banging their vocal sacs against the soggy earth and sending waves of vibrations. Female white-lipped fogs and rival males are extremely sensitive to vibrations and, from them, can judge the size, age and distance of the croaker.

Human survival
When jungle tribesmen travel through the forest they use some of the same tricks as the animals: buttress roots are banged and they splash in forest rivers to broadcast their whereabouts. The penetrating voices of pygmies in the Congo are haunting. They almost yodel their songs, joining in with each other if they are nearby. Even today, with our sophisticated communications technology, ancient techniques are the best. Walkie-talkies and satellite phones are next to useless when you’re under a closed jungle canopy.

Insect antidotes
Most jungle insects have special antidotes in their stomach and blood that enable them to eat their host plants. But the insects are effectively trapped into dependence on one or two plant species. This is partly why jungles are so diverse: each plant and tree has its own exclusive community of insect leaf-eaters. On a single tree in Panama, scientists found 163 types of beetle that lived only on that species. With 50,000 tree species in the jungle, that’s a lot of beetles!

Munching mammals
Scores of mammals munch at the greenery. Leaf-eating monkeys search for the new tips on the outer branches of canopy trees. Still in the early stages of amassing their poisons, these are more edible than most. To cope with this high-fibre diet, these monkeys have huge bellies in which the leaf matter slowly ferments – they’re basically tree-living cows!

Slow eaters
The master of leaf-eating is the sloth, the most abundant mammals in the South American canopy. Sloths have an internal compost heap - a community of microbes in their gut - capable of taking on most leaves. Leaves are hardly rich in energy, so the sloth has adapted to a pace of life that wouldn’t be possible for most animals. It moves incredibly slowly, sleeps for 19 hours a day, hides itself with a coat of algae and only goes to the loo once a week.

Nectar
Jungle flowers are full of energy-rich nectar and a host of animals spend their lives moving from flower to flower in search of it. A single rainforest tree can produce 600,000 flowers in full bloom: over 200 litres of nectar and more than a million calories! Few trees can sustain this, so most flower for only a few weeks every year. The animals know when to expect it, and time their commute through the canopy accordingly, pollinating the trees in return.

Flower power
Different trees entice different animals with specially constructed flowers. Flowers for butterflies and moths have long slender trumpets. Bird flowers are robust, brightly coloured and shaped like bird feeders. Bat flowers have two forms: either cup shaped, dowsing the head of the bat with pollen as it leans to get at the nectar, or with a shaving brush of stamens, which brushes against the bat’s chest as it feeds. Bees prefer brightly coloured flowers with little landing strips visible in ultra-violet light.

Fruit
There are over 3,000 different jungle fruits on offer. Fig trees are the most dependable source - in any one neighbourhood, there's always one in fruit. A a single fig tree can produce up to 250kg of fruit at a time. Worldwide, over 2000 different animals visit the fig feast, and a single tree might attract more than 100 different species.

Foraging gangs
Chimpanzees thrive on fruit and spend much of their time searching for the best trees. Fruit is scarce and takes a lot of finding. They co-operate in large foraging gangs that fan out into the jungle. Within a short time, a troop can scan a huge area of forest. When a suitable tree is located, deafening screams and hoots announce the find.

Flower markets
There are two flower markets in the jungle. Plants that employ insects for pollination dip bunches of small, fragrant flowers below the canopy where a permanent buzz of insect traffic is ready to take the pollen away on short journeys. Plants needing a long-haul courier service put on showy bouquets of colour to attract the birds, bats and bees – animals that cover large distances in a single flight.

Fruit drops
Fruits are the staple diet of a host of birds and mammals in the canopy where some fruit-eaters snap up the fruits before they are ripe. Those on the forest floor have to wait patiently for the leftover crumbs, dropped by the canopy feeders.

Meat
Most prey animals live in the canopy, but all jungles have forest floor herbivores - mice, rats, tiny deer, forest pigs and oversized rodents like the agouti - which feed some of the largest and most vicious predators on Earth. But tigers, leopards and jaguars take only a fraction of the game. The smaller prey animals are devoured by smaller carnivores - jaguarundis, ocelots, mongooses, various badgers and a host of cat-like civets and genets.

Bugs
The most common meat around comes from the bugs of all shapes and sizes that are everywhere in the jungle. Some are poisonous but many of our closest relatives eat them: bushbabies, tarsiers and mouse lemurs are all primates that catch insects with speed and agility. The chameleon uses a sticky tongue and spiders ensnare bugs in webs.

Swarm feeding
Driver ants live in the largest colonies of any ant with up to 22 million members. When they mobilise they become a swarm of immense proportions. In a single day, a driver ant swarm can capture over 100,000 bugs, which they overwhelm, dismember into portable chunks and carry back to their nest. Their impact on the forest is so great that as they advance they leave behind a jungle almost devoid of insect life.

Leave the leaves
Just like the leaves of the canopy, the greenery down on the forest floor might appear to be an abundant food source, but many here are poisonous and others arm themselves with spines and thorns to keep the plant eaters at bay.

Dietary drugs
Silverback lowland gorillas males lead their family groups through the jungle in search of edible ground plants. Their favourite is Marantaceae, an oversized relative of the prayer plant that lives in clusters under gaps in the canopy. But even these plants are mildly poisonous and the gorillas have to supplement their diet with marsh plants rich in mineral salts to soothe their stomachs.

Human survival
For rainforest people, finding enough food is a big challenge. The scarcity of animals on the forest floor means there's less protein in the jungle than in the desert. Only by knowing which plants, fungi and animals are edible and by living in small groups, scattered over a wide area, can they sustain themselves on the forest’s poor harvest.

Fruits, edible leaves, nuts and tubers are important and the locals know when all the good trees come into fruit. Some foodstuffs deserve special gathering trips. When in season, the pygmies of the Congo gather their favourite snacks – caterpillars. Another luxury item is honey from bees' nests far up in the canopy.

Stalking is the most common meat hunting method though people use rifles more and more. Deadly poisons from jungle frogs make paralysing blowpipe darts and arrows are poisoned with the resins of forest plants, enabling people to fell monkeys and birds high up in the canopy. The Congo's pygmies use nets to 'fish' for animals on the floor. They string tough vine rope around a patch of forest, then shout and bang drums until all the animals inside are captured.

Long fingers - tarsiers
Tarsiers have very long digits which they can wrap around branches, but your fingers and toes are stubby - and you weigh far too much!

Limb length - monkeys
In many jungles lianas trail from one tree to another and many animals use these as highways. Larger species, like the monkeys, have forelimbs and hindlimbs of a similar length so they can walk comfortably along branches and large lianas. Your legs are much longer than your arms and you have muscles at the back of your neck that make it difficult to walk on all fours and look ahead at the same time. The best option is to crawl – but it’s slow progress and not very stable.

Prehensile tails
One excellent canopy gadget is the prehensile tail that acts like a fifth limb. These are particularly common in the Amazon, where the lianas are more slender and moving between trees more precarious. The closest you could get is a safety rope attached to a belt. Once you've overcome the difficulties of climbing and you’re up among the branches, what next? You need to be able to explore other food opportunities and perhaps avoid predators and to do this you need to move around the canopy. So how do you get from one tree to another?

Lemurs
Lemurs jump from tree to tree, turning their body in mid-leap. They have very long, muscular legs, large gripping feet and very narrow hipbones so that their midriff is flexible. You’ve got none of these adaptations. Your legs are muscular, but your hipbones are fused – built for strength not flexibility. You could rotate in midair, but you'd find it hard to propel yourself from a clinging position, because your hip is inflexible and your big toes cannot grip. Plus, you’re far too heavy. The heaviest lemur weighs 10kg - about the same as a toddler!

Gibbons
Gibbons literally gallop through the trees. Their hands are like hooks, their arms are 1.5 times the length of their legs and their wrists have ball-and-socket joints that allow them to swing like a pendulum. Your fingers are stubby, your legs are gangly and your wrists are fragile – built for fine movements, not support. Swinging puts immense pressure on your shoulders. Whilst gibbons travel miles like this every day, you would find it exhausting to travel more than a few metres. Gibbons can leap up to 12m (40ft) in a single bound. So coupled with their amazing ability to swing, this makes them the ultimate canopy athletes.

Reptiles
The trees in Borneo's rainforests are spaced further apart than in other forests, so perhaps this is why there are more flying mammals and reptiles here. Using skin flaps like wings, tiny dragon lizards can glide up to 100m. Some snakes can glide too and even steer themselves from one branch to another. This is leaping with a difference - using the best sky-diving equipment available.

Orang-utans
Weight isn't always an insurmountable issue. Orang-utans can weigh as much as adult humans and can even use it to their advantage, swinging from branch to branch to bridge gaps. It’s a great idea, but it helps to have long arms and gripping feet. It can take them up to six years to perfect this technique.

Human survival
Problem solving and tool use are well-developed in humans. Rainforest people lash fibre around trunks to help them climb, or they simply build ladders. If one tree is difficult to climb, they use a neighbour and clamber across higher up.

But humans left the trees millions of years ago and our bodies are designed for life on the ground. The underworld is a difficult place to live in, but your intelligence is an advantage. Forest tribes explore their territory regularly, hunting, gathering or simply patrolling for danger or changes in the jungle wilderness. They often use animal trails to get around, but they also navigate by other means.

Rainforest people tend to recognise their position more by sound than by vision. They know in which parts of the forest certain animals live and recognise their calls. They listen for the telltale bubbling of jungle streams and navigate by them. They even recognise different parts of the forest by the extent to which they swallow up sounds, singing into the vegetation in order to work out their location.

Duiker - early warning system
Forest floor herbivores like the duiker have many predators including civet cats, monitor lizards, pythons, large owls and man. A heightened sensory awareness is critical to keep them on their guard so they are literally a bundle of nerves constantly poised for evasive manoeuvres.

Insects - warning signs
Nasty-tasting insects don’t hide away, they flaunt themselves with warning colours. The colouration of the fulgorid planthopper acts as a warning for predators of its toxic composition. If a predator ignores the warnings - and survives - it learns to associate the colour patterns with bad experience and avoid this prey in future.

Safety in numbers - colobus monkeys
Individual safety and territorial defence can be easier if you live in a group. Colobus monkeys may even live alongside other species of monkey that eat different foods, so safety is increased without additional competition for food resources. The dilution of prey means greater safety for individuals and more eyes and ears means a better chance of an early warning. Different alarm calls alert the group to the type of danger so they can adopt the best defensive strategy.

Mechanism - Camouflage
If you can’t run, hide! A startling number of creatures hide away by blending into the background. Clever use of dappled light and a confusion of greens makes their outlines disappear.

Insects
Insects including beetles, mantids, caterpillars moths and crickets are champion camouflage artists. Canopy-dwelling species are often green to blend in with foliage and the ground-dwellers often brown so they can take refuge amongst the leaf litter on the forest floor. Those that live among the flowers are dressed in pinks, yellows, oranges and reds to suit.

Reptiles
Some reptiles have adapted to resemble other species that are highly toxic, cashing in on the association with danger. Predators avoid eating both just in case. Chameleons are champions of disguise. Species in Africa and Madagascar have the best colour-changing ability and will often assume bright orange, purple and blue colouring to reflect their surroundings. When faced with an enemy, a special gland in the skin releases the appropriate pigment.

Mammals
Mammals use spots or stripes to camouflage their outline. In the shade of the canopy, large mammals such as leopards, jaguars and ocelots are very difficult to see owing to their disruptive colouration. Sloths have colonies of green algae coating their fur which help them blend in to the vegetation. Their slow movements make them easy to miss for predators who rely on movement to detect prey. The okapi, a relative of the giraffe, is so hard to spot it wasn’t discovered by scientists until 1901.

Mechanism - Mimicry
Mimicry is a different technique to camouflage. Here the entire anatomy of the animal is built to resemble a different article. Many of the jungle’s leaves turn out to be beetles, its sharp thorns may actually be bugs queued along a stem and on closer inspection, a fair few of its sticks have mouths. Insects, especially, go in for this extreme fancy dress and some of their costumes defy belief.

Moths and butterflies
Many moth and butterfly species have large, dark markings or 'eye-spots' that they flash to momentarily startle a predator. This allows them extra precious seconds to escape. They also work by giving predators a false target. A butterfly or moth has a better chance of surviving an attack to the outer part of its wing than an attack to the head.

Lizards
The Uroplatus geckos of Madagascar have tails that mimic leaves and bodies that resemble dead leaves and twigs. This mimicry is enhanced with behavioural adaptations. Stick insects, for example, will play dead and fall from their perches or even go so far as to shed a limb in order to avoid predators.

Mechanism - Chemical warfare
Tasting bad is the most common form of protection here - virtually all the jungle’s plants fill their precious leaves and stems with poisons. Whilst very little of the forest is then edible to us, it doesn’t stop insects. Insects evolve faster than plants largely because their generation times are much quicker – a bug may have ten generations a year, while a tree may have one every ten years. So no matter how toxic a plant gets there will always be insects that can tolerate it.

Butterflies
Some butterflies, such as the Heliconia that eats the poisonous passion flower vine, have evolved the ability to store poisonous chemicals from the food plants they eat as caterpillars. They stay distasteful to predators in their adult form.

Frogs
Some of the famous poison arrow frogs of South America have enough toxins in them to kill 10 people at a time. They exude these toxins from glands in their skin which makes even the slightest touch potentially lethal. The poison from the frogs contains powerful batrachotoxin, which brings on total system shutdown. This is manufactured from the insects consumed by the frogs and secreted on to their skin. Jungle tribes use the poison to tip their arrows - posing a risky harvesting problem!

Weapons
In the jungle it pays to pack a weapon. A cocktail of poisons can be so deadly that simply touching them can put your life in danger. Jungle trees and bushes arm themselves with spines, thorns, sticky resins and slippery trunks.

Palms
Some of the jungle palm species, such as the Amazon's Astrocaryum, have evolved long, sharp spines as effective protective devices against herbivores. The spines may also help in camouflaging insects which may be carrying out pollination for the palms.

Ants
Giant forest ants don't sting but have mandibles that can give a nasty bite. They also spray acid. Animals that don't have stinging or biting parts have evolved weapons like modified hairs that give rise to spines on the bodies of butterfly and moth larvae and barbed hairs on the abdomen of tarantulas that can be kicked off in the face of a predator.

Mechanism - Guards
Arming yourself takes time, energy and nutrients. Plants that can’t afford these precious commodities have turned to another, more cunning mode of protection – hired help. Often, they pay the bodyguards back with nutrients or returned protection.

Tetraponera ants
The most common security force is a colony of resident ants. Trees such as the barteria have evolved a mutual relationship with particularly vicious Tetraponera ants. When anything touches the tree, the ants swarm out over its surface and remove interlopers. In payment, the ants graze on the fungi growing on the leaves and branches and feed at special taps that drip nectar into their mouths. The tree also provides lavish accommodation – the branches are hollow and parts of the stem are swollen to create barracks.

Back-hander butterflies
Some species of jungle butterfly have caterpillars with special organs that offer up a 'back-hander' of proteins to the ants. In return the ant security force are not only prepared to look the other way, they even protect the caterpillars from wasps that prey on them.

Human survival
Alone in the jungle, humans are vulnerable - slow moving with poor senses. The smell of your sweat hangs about you and each of your movements is obvious against the motionless green background. Even breathing gives you away as biting insects home in on the 'smoke signals' of exhaled carbon dioxide. It’s difficult to go a few metres without snapping twigs and stumbling over roots.

Being human is your biggest defence against large predators. We are the most devastating hunters on earth and the biggest creatures have learned to avoid us. Far more dangerous are the parasites that search us out. A mosquito bite might annoy a bit, but it’s what the mosquito carries that makes it dangerous - malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever and filaria. Mossie nets and insect sprays are the best defence: these insects rely on your scent to track you down and the smell of insect sprays confuses them. But they also look for movement and the heat you give off, so you can’t always escape...

Though these diseases still take their toll, gradually the tribes have become more resistant. They've also learned to use the jungle’s own poisons as defence. The forest people treat the jungle like a wild pharmacy, gathering up the most useful leaves, seeds and berries.

Sticking out - termites
Termites have solved the lack of soil problem by building enormous mounds above ground. Dark-coloured mounds are made out of the surface soil and are fairly fragile. The larger orange-coloured mounds are built by more committed termites that spend weeks excavating the tough clay from below the soil line. These constructions shelter a fungus that they grow in the darker chambers to break down material that not even the termites can cope with. Once the fungus has done its work, the termites eat it up.

Home to roost - bats
Bats need shelter more than most, but find anything other than flying extremely difficult. In mountainous jungles, bat caves are the favourite. These are scarce in lowland rainforest so bats hole up in the base of rotting trees. The old world leaf-nosed bat of the Congo hunts near the ground, so an empty tree trunk is perfectly sited. It’s thought that some tree species are designed to rot quickly create these natural bat houses.

High rise apartments - frogs, snakes and mice
For the animals of the canopy, 40m above the ground, finding shelter has its problems. Epiphytes live in flamboyant hanging gardens on the branches of the largest rainforest trees and many animals find shelter in their foliage. The bird’s nest ferns of South-east Asia are the largest epiphytes in the world, weighing up to 200kg and 2m across. Studies have shown that a large bird’s nest fern can harbour up to 400,000 animals, from insects to snakes, frogs and even mice.

Holed up - great hornbill
Where branches have broken off, there are holes in the trunks of the trees. These are the perfect penthouse suites for a wealth of birds and mammals and change hands regularly. One resident particularly keen to acquire a tree hole is the great hornbill. Without a hole of their own, a pair of hornbills cannot breed. To ensure their chick's survival, the female seals herself inside as well and the male makes up to 10 visits per day to feed her and the chick.

Safety in numbers - driver ants
Instead of a permanent home, driver ants make a temporary nest or bivouac out of their own bodies! Its living walls raise the internal temperature by 4°C – just right for the growing grubs inside. But the driver ants don't stay in one place for long. After a few days they undertake an exodus - 20 million ants carry around two million grubs across the forest floor to make camp in new hunting grounds.

Human survival
So how would you take shelter? Rainforest people are experts at using the natural products of the jungle to provide them with shelter. The BaAka pygmies in the Congo, set up temporary camps in the jungle when on hunting trips knocking up a waterproof shelter within an hour.